What the Rand Paul/Civil Rights Act thing reminds me of (UPDATES)

“Just put yourself in the position — you’re an African American family and you’re about to travel halfway across the country, how would you feel if we had a hotel chain that said, ‘No blacks,’” he said. “We’re not going back to that. That’s not an infringement on anything. That’s an upholding of an individual citizen’s right to be able to travel in this country.”

Being Canadian, I can’t help but notice the similarities between the liberal/”conservative” reaction to this (see Frum, who I’m not linking to) and the “arguments” we deal with up here about free speech and Section 13.

Sowell notes that champions of the Official Version of History ignore already existing trends in black employment, well under way long before the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, from which we are taught all blessings flowed. Writes Sowell: “In the period from 1954 to 1964, for example, the number of blacks in professional, technical, and similar high-level positions more than doubled. In other kinds of occupations, the advance of blacks was even greater during the 1940s — when there was little or no civil rights policy — than during the 1950s when the civil rights revolution was in its heyday.

“The rise in the number of blacks in professional and technical occupations in the two years from 1964 to 1966 (after the Civil Rights Act) was in fact less than in the one year from 1961 to 1962 (before the Civil Rights Act).”

*** I need more coffee but, at random:

Libertarians often make the “so why don’t you just move?” argument. It’s one of my favorites, too. But I haven’t noticed them doing that this time. I’m not all-knowing, however; maybe someone online has.

But he had unwisely lent his name to a clique of libertarian writers whose misbegotten strategy was to rally the white working class against “big government” by exploiting resentment of the “parasitic Underclass.”